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

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

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

The tempest in a teapot last week in the twitter-verse was all about how Twitter cut UberTwitter clients off from its API, which looked like a platform-vs-app battle between Twitter and UberMedia (Bill Gross’ company).

But as Mark Suster says in the linked article, when Twitter cut off UberTwitter clients – it wasn’t really hurting UberTwitter as much as it was hurting its own users.  Users with literally millions of followers use UberTwitter.  But many of the followers do not.  So by cutting off these clients, Twitter was implicitly (explicitly?) cutting the social connections from the glitterati to the following.  To me, Twitter ends up looking like the bad guy in these scuffles, even when it might seem that they’re right.

What does this have to do with Apple? It banned Flash preemptively  from iOS devices- putting up with the beating it took in the press – so that it wouldn’t look like even more of a bad guy later by severing users from Flash apps that it deemed either unstable or security risks (or simply, not “Apple” enough).

Because when your users depend on a particular UI candy that you don’t control, and there are enough of them, the purveyors of that UI start to get leverage on your platform – if you do things to disable that UI, or punish the vendors of the UI, you are also punishing your own users.

Of course, UberMedia could have had an alternate plumbing set up to keep users’ messages flowing during this outage – outside of Twitter.  But Adobe is in a tougher spot because developing a tablet or phone just to prove you can run Flash on it is a much more expensive end-around.  They’re still waiting on their hardware and software partners to come out with the killer combination that proves Adobe Flash will run just as well on mobile devices as HTML5 / iOS.

I can’t say I’m happy that I can’t run Flash on my phone.  But I’m not sad either.  Not as sad as I’d be if my favorite, Twitter client, say, ran on Flash and then was abruptly disabled because Apple decided to enforce rules against Flash.  (Oh wait, that’s exactly what Apple appears to be doing with its new subscription rules… )

Sandy attended a sneak peak of Blueworks Live recently, and has reported on it in her blog:

They are trying to reinvent the public BPM community, while avoiding the problems that they perceive with other vendors’ community sites:

• They are mainly product support sites
• They have high membership numbers, but low participation
• A majority of the information is from the sponsor company
• The customer perception is that these sites are proprietary and biased, and that there’s already too many sources of information on BPM

I think they have some of the right ideas here – they’ve identified legitimate problems with the current approaches of these communities – but there’s still some work to do on defining what a healthy BPM community consists of.  I think they have a couple elements right, such as:

1.  A common thread tying it all together: BPM / Process

2.  A “safe” place to share (company spaces, or even more granular spaces)

3.  Don’t try to reinvent twitter, just leverage it

But the mechanics will take some work.  As Sandy points out, pro-level users of Twitter aren’t going to rely on BlueWorks Live to show them interesting tweets.  Having said that, however, how many people are going to add a column for “#bwlive” to their TweetDeck?  So it may be somewhat additive to the experience, but time will tell. Sandy says “It’s probably good for the Twitter newbies, since they haven’t figured out groups, hashtags or Tweetdeck yet; maybe that’s more representative of the expected user base.”  I think that’s probably right – more representative of the expected user base.  Most of the personnel I work with don’t use Twitter at all yet.

Like Sandy, I think their blog section needs to pull in content from other sources.  I think they could curate this somewhat by reaching out to prominent bloggers (like Sandy) and ask for permission to republish interesting posts (or set up a submission process for authors to bring relevant posts to their attention).

I think the real question for BlueWorks Live:  is this the Minimum Viable Product offering, to be improved upon in future releases, or do Phil and IBM believe that it is fully baked?  I believe it is the former, and that the intention is to keep releasing frequent updates and improvements, as they were doing with Blueprint before.

You can see our previous coverage of this topic here (our sneak preview was a little earlier, but we’re looking forward to just laying hands on the product and taking it for a test drive on Saturday).  BlueWorks Live announcement here.

I read a lot of BPM coverage and commentary.  I also read a lot of software industry news and startup news, and Apple-related commentary, because of my personal interests and because of cross-pollination.  Sometimes a theme will emerge that cuts across these interests and it just jumps off the screen.

Right now, that theme is simplicity. Neil Ward-Dutton touched on it when he mentioned the new focus IBM has on “consumability” in its acquisitions. But lets take a quick diversion to talk about some articles that make the same point.

Television

First, this hilarious post by Mark Cuban: “The Future of TV is… TV” (Now, why didn’t I think of that?!). In a world run amok about streaming video and TV going away, Mark points out:

You know what is AMAZING about VOD  ? It gives you thousands of choices and its already connected to your TV. It just works.

You don’t have to buy another box. You don’t have to figure out how to connect it to your TV. You don’t have to stream from another device over your WIFI netork and get all confused about how to pull video from the internet. It just works.  That’s what you want when you unbox that great big flat screen TV. You want it to work…. like a TV. Easily. Quickly.

That isn’t to say money won’t be made streaming video.  But TV isn’t going away – and people aren’t shelling out for new HDTVs for nothing.  Interestingly, Mark has a followup on this article because of the Google TV news – and his answer for the future of TV is still… TV (however, he sounded like he liked the Google offering as announced).

Twitter

Not long ago, SAI covered Twitter’s announcement of a new product called “Blackbird Pie“, a product for “embeddable tweets”. I guess the idea was that you could quote someone more reliably.  But it is something like a 7 step process – and one of those steps is to go to this twitter url and paste in the URL of a tweet that you want to embed/quote.  Of course, most people use twitter clients, so they’re not looking at a tweet URL to begin with.  What people typically do is just quote someone.  Or if they really want to get clever, take a screenshot of the tweet so that the wording isn’t as likely to be questioned.  Simple.  For a service that prides itself on “simplicity”, it isn’t clear that Twitter still realized how crucial simplicity is to its service when they roll out unnecessarily complicated features like this. Worse yet, according to SAI:

Besides being WAY too complicated, here’s what else is wrong with Blackbird Pie.

• Twitter justified its existence by saying that it would prevent people from being misquoted. Problem is, it’s very easy to manipulate Blackbird Pie code to misquote its source.
• If tweets are supposed to be embeddable, THEY SHOULD ALL HAVE AN EMBED BUTTON JUST LIKE YOUTUBE VIDEOS, EGAD.
• There’s no easy way to customize the code Blackbird Pie pumps out. What if you want the tweet to be 640 pixels wide?
• We tried using the embeddable tweets. Didn’t work. Didn’t work on TechCrunch either (see below).
• Blackbird Pie has already crashed.

That criticism stings because it reminds us of other false starts from Twitter.  The article goes on to skewer the @anywhere feature as well, and the fact that it co-opted the “Retweet” but didn’t implement it the same way… and yet decided to use the same name (adding to the confusion).  Not content to be a simple status and notification service with a lightweight footprint, Twitter is overcomplicating things as it tries to extend its control.

Apple

Meanwhile, in Cupertino, Apple puts out a product that simultaneously elicits rave reviews and dismissals.  It is so easy to focus on what it doesn’t do. Amy of the “Cheerful Software Manifesto” has a wonderful way of putting this, I just had to quote it verbatim:

The iPad, though, unlike the Newton, is going to win, and win on an epic scale.

Nevertheless, the shortsightedness of punditry is evergreen. Instead of praising the iPad, critics express their disappointment, because they expected more. They expected a genre buster. They expected something they’d never seen before, something beyond their imagination. Something revolutionary.

They’re disappointed that the iPad is so… well… unsurprising.

Therein, of course, lies the genius.

THE IPAD IS BARELY A SURPRISE AT ALL
The design, delivery, and timing of the iPad couldn’t be more different than the Newton. The iPad wasn’t a surprise at all. It’s the capstone in a family of devices.

There’s a cozy, pre-existing slot in people’s brains that the iPad fills quite nicely.

“Oh,” they say. “It’s a big iPhone.”

It doesn’t matter if they utter that phrase in distaste. That little sand grain of dismissal becomes the core around which will form a pearl of understanding.

“Trying to deal with email on the iPhone is tough. The screen’s too small.”

“I wish we could both work on this at the same time.”

“I’d like to sketch concepts with touch, but I keep running off the borders.”

Ding ding ding.

(The emphasis was hers)

Her point: rather than change everything, or revolutionize (as the Newton attempted to do), we need to prepare the ground, and build on what went before.  The iPhone has laid the groundwork for the App Store, and the developer community, which in turn prepared us for the advent of the iPad.  Jon Gruber takes this point further with “This is how Apple Rolls“:

Next, consider the iPod. It debuted in the fall of 2001 as a Mac-only, FireWire-only $399 digital audio player with a tiny black-and-white display and 5 GB hard disk. The iTunes Store didn’t exist until April 2003. The Windows version of iTunes didn’t appear until October 2003—two years after the iPod debuted! Two years before it truly supported Windows! Think about that. If Apple released an iPod today that sold only as many units as the iPod sold in 2002, that product would be considered an enormous flop.

Today you can get an iPod nano for $179 that’s a fraction of the original iPod’s size and weight, with double the storage, a color display, video playback, and a built-in video camera. Apple took the iPod from there to here one step at a time. Every year Apple has announced updated iPods in the fall, and every year the media has weighed in with a collective yawn.

There’s never been one iteration of the click-wheel iPod platform that has completely blown away the previous one, and even the original model was derided by many critics as unimpressive.

The same thought process applies to Mac OS X, and (so far) to the iPhone… and likely it will apply to the iPad.  Where each year (or so) a significant improvement will be made to the platform, but perhaps never blowing us away as compared to the previous version.  But comparing versions across 2-3 years, we’ll see improvements across the board.  A big part of this is starting as simple as possible.

There’s a simplicity to the Apple ecosystem and products that really makes it easier to engage with their products as users.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Mike Gammage talks about “Cracking Complexity” – and how BPM creates strategic value:

Institutional complexity stems from strategic choices about organizational and operating systems. It’s a consequence of the number of nodes and interactions within an organization. It’s about geographies, customer segments, business units, products, regulatory jurisdictions and manufacturing locations.

Individual complexity is defined by McKinsey as “how hard it is to get things done”. It’s the complexity that the vast majority of employees face – typically due to poor processes, confusing roles, or unclear accountability.

Apparently most execs focus on institutional complexity, but individual complexity can really impact the bottom line (negatively).  If individuals can get their job done more easily, and more importantly have visibility as to how to get their job done, then you’ve really increased your organization’s efficiency.  As Mike puts it: “There are jaw-dropping hidden costs arising from confusion in roles and accountability across end-to-end processes. And similarly enormous costs of IT failure where IT and the business are not speaking the same language. ”

If BPM is defined correctly, then it’s a C-Level issue. BPM is not about new ways to automate, it’s a far broader canvas. Process excellence goes way beyond just standardising and automating. BPM is about the management, adoption and continual improvement of every process, whether automated or not. And it’s about wrapping in compliance, risks and controls so that it becomes possible to manage the business in 3D.

Framed in this way, BPM is the key to reducing individual complexity – “making it easy to get things done” – whatever the level of institutional complexity.

So, if BPM is about simplifying the individual’s experience of the business – managing for the complexity inherent in any large organization, rather than just trying to oversimplify – then what is, exactly, the role or mission of the BPM software vendor?

Phil Gilbert commented on one of our posts recently:

The shame in all this is that what gets lost in all this scope creep is the original goal, the original promise: BPM technologies should focus on reducing the technical barriers to the definition, creation and maintenance of business information. Instead, we seem to be paying for the Original Sin of BPM which was to focus on BPEL (or BPML before it) as anything to do with any of this. We defined BPM properly, then the industry and some of its early proponents corrupted the delivery.

[...] The beauty of BPM, though, is that it’s about HOW existing technical capabilities can be exposed to a broader audience, an audience more directly connected to the business outcomes than ever before.

Phil goes on with a very good example, versioning… something that literally everyone can do.

“HOW do you version artifacts in a way that’s easy for less technical people to understand?”. Versioning is something everyone can do… so the interesting question isn’t “do you allow versioning” but, rather, HOW do you expose this core capability so that it is accessible to a broader audience and can scale technically.

And the how is important because, as Phil points out, it translates into lower costs and better outcomes.  And honestly, it makes it more likely that you can envision those outcomes in the first place if the how is well thought out – and simple.

It is why installation should be easy, and why we shouldn’t have to hunt for myriad third party libraries and their appropriate hotfixes and fixpacks.  It is why the “checkbox” method of software evaluation doesn’t really cut it (at the very least, use a 1-10 or 1,3,9 scoring methodology so that you can weight things that really *work* versus things that barely get a nod from analysts – but better yet, really understand the depth of the product).

Some argue that BPM is too complex, and therefore shouldn’t be used. For some this is a theoretical argument, but for others they are putting their money where their mouth is and building product that starts with a simple core.  But that is the long road to building out a BPMS.  However, not all vendors are making their BPM offering more complex – as Phil points out above, they’re working hard to make previously complex issues, like versioning, transparent to the user.  It is also why cloud computing will be come increasingly relevant – simplifying (to the user) the task of allocating computing and networking resources to applications.  This is the real magic of software development done right – making previously complicated activities more accessible.

Software companies, and in particular BPM vendors, need to continue to invest in the deep thinking and deep investments to create tools that simplify complicated work; and they need to realize that this is an iterative process – we don’t need the whole thing on a platter 5 years from now – a little progress every year would be great.  Similarly, BPM practitioners need to really think through the processes they build for their participants- providing advanced functionality in a highly consumable package is what BPM is all about.

Someone had to do it, and I’m glad it was Theo Priestley, and not I!

Theo’s written up a summary of the Forrester-initiated BPM Jam on Twitter (thanks Connie!), and did a pretty good job of it.

Key points from his summary, where the idea that education needs to standardize (a la ABPMP), but also needs a more mature, comprehensive approach (a la Lombardi University). I missed this part of the discussion so I’m not sure how people felt about the OMG OCEB examination – of course, since that is a cert only, not a full educational curriculum, that may be why it was overlooked.

Another key point was the idea that a business architect requires 20 yrs of experience with Six Sigma, Lean, TQM under the belt.  As Theo put it:

I disagree somewhat on that point, whilst those methods are ‘nice to haves’ they shouldn’t be prerequisites of a Biz Arch and certainly not as steeped in the skills that they can’t accept outside influences. I’ve seen this among a lot of Master Black Belts and I don’t think they have what it takes to be a Biz Arch on this alone. Needs to be cross-skilled and understand architecture on a wider scale outside of process alone.

I think the key point Theo makes is that if you have adopted the religion of Six Sigma, or Lean or <fill-in-your-favorite-improvement-methodology>, you may be too inflexible to solve BPM problems in the most effective way.  A simple example I’ve seen of this is the Lean and Six Sigma ideal of ignoring technology while improving the process.  As with most doctrines, there is a kernel of a good idea there, but too often it is taken too far – to the point where many six sigma and Lean practitioners seem to be saying that technology can’t inform process improvement approaches – which any software engineer can disprove.  The real point of course is to not let technology slow down the process improvement, which is a very different thing altogether, and something I very much agree with.

I’m a big fan of Google.  And of the products that Google produces that I use (Gmail, Google Apps, Gtalk, Google search itself).  But lately some of the products from Google are reminding me more and more of Microsoft, which has me concerned:

1. Me-too product releases
2. VERY corporate-appropriate names for the products being released
3. Failure to embrace the world outside the ‘plex

Maybe I should explain what I mean in more detail…

Me-Too Product Releases

You might say everything Google has ever done is “me-too” – its not as if Search didn’t exist before Google came along.  Or email.  Or even web email.  Or instant messaging.  Or document editing in a web browser… the list goes on and on.

But the difference in (most of) these cases is that the field had become a bit moribund and was lacking innovation – leaving itself open to a new entrant.  Search seemed like a dead-end.  Web email was stagnant and sites like Yahoo! mail and Hotmail left a lot to be desired.  If there wasn’t a technological edge that Google could gain, then Google was able to exploit an economic edge (more storage for the “free” price, or free document editing on Google Apps instead of paying for MS Word).

But the space of real-time broadcasting and status updates and social graphs is hardly a field of stagnation.  Facebook and Twitter are robust companies at the top of their game for their respective niches.  Foursquare is up-and-coming (and several other firms like it). The problem here is that Google can’t out-innovate these companies in their core competency.  The fast-follow works better if you wait for the arteriosclerosis to set in with these firms – either due to the weight of technical debt they’ve taken on (client side apps, instant messaging), or due to the organizational heft and indecision (Yahoo?) or due to painting themselves into a corner with respect to revenue models (e.g. Microsoft).  The new firms have none of these problems.  They’re nimble, decisive, and have emerging revenue models with little to lose and much to disrupt. VERY corporate-appropriate names for the products being released

Corporate-Appropriate Names

Remember when Microsoft had a lock on this approach to naming applications? Now Google is doing it.  Latitude, Gmail, Gtalk, Buzz, Docs, Apps, etc.  And when they do come up with a “funky” name, it really doesn’t resonate (Orkut?).  Meanwhile, companies with lighthearted names are eating their lunch – Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla.

It just makes me wonder if the suits have taken over important naming-functions at the firm.  Sometimes the name of something affects how people perceive it – even internally.  And unfortunately, even when Google tries to be more whimsical these days, it comes off like they’re trying too hard.

Remember when Google was coming up with whimsical names like… “Google” ?

Failure to Embrace the World Outside the ‘Plex

Search gives Google an advantage in “embracing” the outside world in most of their applications – most noticeably in Google Maps (now there’s a product name with all the creativity of paint drying).  I’m not sure why Google didn’t just buy Twitter and get it over with. But, if Google’s not going to buy Twitter, another straightforward thing to do is embrace it by integrating Twitter functionality into Gmail – not copying Twitter, but leveraging Twitter’s API.  Show how integrating Twitter functionality into your email client could make both more useful.  Show how integrating search into the experience can also make them more powerful.

And then figure out how to slip Google’s own “real-time-update” infrastructure into the mix – perhaps by granting twitter users their identical @names on Google’s infrastructure – essentially adopting the useful conventions of the leading platform.  Don’t make people rebuild their social graph, let them port it over while retaining a separate identity from their email address (one of the beauties of Twitter, for example, is that it is (somewhat) resistant to spam because you only see messages from people you follow).

Well, Google has a lot of smart people – I’m sure they’ll figure out the strategy, but I was disappointed that they didn’t just improve my life by making it easier for me to Tweet (Twitter?) and Facebook.  I’m not the only one who thinks they might have missed the target.  The Business Insider describes Buzz as “Late, Boring, and Lame“.  And Twitter was not full of supportive comments today, e.g.:

cdixon : Prediction: Google’s Twitter killer will be lame. A few billion dollars later they buy Twitter.

cdixon : Besides being just generally bad at social, Google products seem to be suffering from a strategy tax a la MSFT.

I think Google should drop the product launches.  Apple is really good at them, and each product launch creates almost as much negative buzz in the aftermath as positive buzz (where’s my videocamera on the iPad!? who named it “iPad”? ).  If you do a mediocre or “okay” job with the product launches, its even worse.  I suggest they go back to releasing product the Googley way:  by putting it out there and letting people discover it.

Interesting tie-in between process and Twitter on GigaOm recently in an article by Jennifer Martinez.  She points out that Biz Stone’s discussion of the future of twitter appears to follow along the lines of Eric Ries’ “Lean Startup“.  Notably, they intend to follow customer usage to figure out what to build around the original 140-character Twitter service in order to create more value.

Its the first time I’ve actually read something that indicates there’s some method (process?) to the madness that is Twitter – and maybe that is new, or maybe that has been the case for a long time and I’m just now becoming aware.

We’ve recently set up a twitter account for those who want to receive tweets of our blog posts (rather than subscribing via RSS for example).  Its @bp3bpm.  It will just be capturing our blog, and perhaps company-news-items at some point in the future.  I’m personally on twitter as well (@sfrancisatx), but I can’t promise to stay focused on BPM on my twitter feed. We’re just providing an alternate way to keep up with BP3, and BPM.  We’ll see how it develops for us.