Maggie Fox of the Social Media Group recently interviewed me on a podcast about Enterprise 2.0 and BPM. The Avenue A|Razorfish example that I discuss is from the recent Portals & Collaboration conference.
Maggie’s also an organizer of the Toronto Girl Geek Dinners, which kicked off last month.
In case you missed the memo, tomorrow I’ll be presenting the 2nd in the series of webinars that I’m doing with TIBCO this summer: Process Modeling (or Modelling, as we say here in the Great White North). From their promotional email:
Join BPM expert Sandy Kemsley for an in-depth look at process modeling. Sandy will discuss the most important aspects of process design, including:
- Identifying process initiation points
- Identifying touchpoints with other systems — for example, how BPM and SOA interact
- Simulating the new process
- Process modeling notation and standards — what can be modeled?
- Identifying changing job roles
- Creating a structured model for implementation
- Identifying where your ROI will be generated and how to track it
You can sign up for this webinar, and the one next month on Process Design, here.
You have to give TIBCO credit for having the funniest, catchiest and most innovative marketing in the SOA space (they haven’t really turned their “fun” marketing focus on BPM yet, but I’m waiting):
Received this afternoon from an email address at processperformance.com, unfortunately substantiating my prediction of a couple of weeks ago:
Subject: BPMG / BPMV Ltd Chairman’s Final Statement
I communicated with as many of the BPMG members as I could a short while ago about the unfortunate position with regard to the company. As I said in that e-mail I took over the running of the company in an attempt to resolve matters.
I must unfortunately report that I have been unable to resolve these matters and Bennu Group LLC continue in their refusal to reinstate our websites or release any information that would give BPMG access to those sites. According to public record information Steve Towers is a director and officer of Bennu Group LLC. At no time did Mr Towers declare his Bennu status to his fellow directors on the board of BPM Ventures Limited or BPM Group.
The report that I have presented on June 29th 2007 is confidential to the board and shareholders of BPM Ventures Limited but I can indicate that it identifies certain matters that may well become the subject of legal claims in the future. My task in this matter was to try to resolve the matters as quickly as possible in the interest of the members and clients of BPMG. Having provided my report to the board and not being able to resolve the position I have no desire to continue in this role and I have therefore resigned my directorship in the company although I remain a shareholder.
At the same time our Administration and Finance Manager Rose Butler has also resigned. She will no longer be able to answer BPMG members or clients queries. In addition, David Lyneham-Brown has also resigned his roles and directorships of BPMG. With David being the prime technical developer of the BPMG training and development approach this is regretful. Imre Hegedus has stepped down as our Global Director of Chapters and the principal organiser of our autumn conference having done a sterling job in both these areas to date. We have already advised people that we cannot run the conference because like our other web sites Process2007 has been entirely under the control of Bennu Group LLC and we have had no access to it. As of June 30th 2007 Stephen Bernard Towers is the sole remaining director of BPM Ventures Limited and the BPM Group and all enquiries should be directed to him.
I would like to wish Imre, David and Rose the best for the future and I am sure they will continue with their very effective contributions to international BPM training, development and practise. I would also like to thank the many members and clients of BPMG who have contacted me with information and best wishes over the last few weeks. I can only regret that we have been unable to resolve matters in their best interests.
I would expect to see some commentary on all of these things on the BPMG and Bennu web site as I feel it is likely that the BPMG web site will be quickly reactivated. I will have to leave it to your own discretion as to your belief in any commentary in relation to my actions.
Kind Regards
Stewart Ashton
I’m attending Mashup Camp on July 17th-18th, then staying on in the Bay area for the BPM Think Tank on the 23rd-25th. If you’re going to be at either of these, let me know or look me up when I’m there.
Any suggestions for what to do in the intervening three days are welcome.
I just received an email from a BPM vendor (let’s call them XYZ so as not to overly embarrass them), as follows:
Hi Sandy,
We are currently gathering feedback from BPM experts on XYZ’s position in the marketplace. As I know you are insanely busy, it would be greatly appreciated if you could answer the following questions below.
Describe XYZ in three words (not using Business / Process / Management)
§ Who are XYZ’s competitors?
§ How does XYZ differentiate itself from its competition?
§ What benefits does XYZ Offer?
§ What are XYZ’s biggest opportunities?
§ What are XYZ’s biggest challenges?
I REALLY appreciate you taking the time to help with this. Please let me know if you need anything or have any questions.
Best,
[signed by a person who I have never heard of, with no title attached although I assume it’s somewhere in marketing]
I’m guessing that “BPM experts” at Gartner and Forrester didn’t receive similar emails, and that this is a special email directed at independent analysts, bloggers and other people who they figure are good for a free opinion.
I really hate going through a lengthy interview about a hot new product, only to have them tell me at the end that half of what they told me is off the record. Not embargoed until some near-future announcement date, just off the record. Grrr.
Other than that, I had a pretty good demo last week from Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, who I missed at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. LongJump is the brand for a service provided by Relationals, which has been in business since 2003 with a hosted CRM plaform targetted at media companies. Bonus marks to Pankaj, who starts into the presentation saying that their target users are business managers who organize information and create workflow, then in an aside, says “I see that you’re a business process management expert”, which means that either he’s looked at my blog or his PR person has briefed him well. 🙂
All of their solutions, including both those with the Relationals brand and the new LongJump hosted solutions, are focussed on the small to medium business market. LongJump, in fact, is created on the same underlying platform as the Relationals CRM, including components such as the MySQL database.
LongJump is a platform for creating data-driven, widget-based web applications, as well as offering a shared catalog environment for offering those applications by subscription to other users, including monetization of the applications. The application assembly environment is similar to an iGoogle home page, or other similar portal environments: widgets can be placed on the page, although they can’t exchange data or do other data mashup/filtering functionality like Yahoo Pipes. They have their own widget format, but it’s similar to the Google widget format and they’re working on making it identical so that widget created for Google could be used in LongJump.
The demo application was an asset tracking application, and I didn’t see much difference from the seemly endless array of lightweight web-based application development environments until he started showing me how to apply workflow to objects. There’s no graphical process mapper, but you can set states through which an object must pass and the predefined responses at each of those states, which in turn creates a sequence of tasks assigned to specific people or roles. The workflows can be triggered by data events, such as “renewal date less than 30 days”. This is crude from a BPM standpoint — it reminds me a lot of what IBM had in their Content Manager application a couple of years ago to do simple object-based workflow routing — but I haven’t seen anything else like it in this space. They plan to enhance this capability further, and I think that they could have a real competitive differentiator here.
Each application is “packaged” for publication on their catalog; for example, the Asset Tracking application above consists of all of the tabs that you see along the top (Home, Directory, PCs and Servers, Phones, Equipment, Reports, About), where each of those tabs has its own set of widgets and the underlying data sources. The catalog then makes published applications available for subscription by others, and handles the monetization.
LongJump is in an early (closed) beta now, with an open beta expected by end of year — I find this a longish timeline for this sort of application, but it’s coming from a more traditional company so I expect that their internal test and release procedures are different from the usual hair-on-fire Web 2.0 startup. They received 1,800 applicants for the closed beta, and have about 10 customers on there now.
I received an email this morning about the upcoming Business Process Excellence Exchange (BPEE) conference organized by IQPC in London this October — obviously replacing the BPMG conference that they used to organize. The only problem is the speaker list, which has both Steve Towers and Terry Schurter listed as being with BPMG.
You’d think that the conference organizers would have figured out a bit of what’s happening (or not happening) with BPMG these days, since they had to actually change the name of the conference from last year…
Hope that everyone here in Canada had a great Canada Day weekend, and that everyone south of the border has a great 4th of July tomorrow.
Blogging will be light this week, since I expect that half of my readers are on vacation.
